A.j. croce

A.J. Croce (from the album Just Like Medicine available on Compass Records)
Acknowledging the role that music has played in his life, A. J. Croce admits that ‘I’ve been to therapy for twenty-five years and it never helped me as much as sitting down and playing the piano or writing a song’. Just Like Medicine, the eighth album for A.J. Croce, serves as a healer for others as the songs offer their own remedies and support. Just Like Medicine opens with hard rhythms and haunted harmony playing the role of inner-voices with “Gotta Get Out of My Head”, sits at a piano for an after-hours Blues with “I Couldn’t Stop”, hits the highway fueled by chaotic keyboards on “The Roads, and walks down the aisle saved by love on the gospel-flavored Rock’n’Soul of “Cures Just Like Medicine”.
Partnering with songwriter (“Dark End of the Street”, “I’m Your Puppet”) and producer (The Box Tops, Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland, Clarence Carter) Dan Penn, A.J. Croce set out to make a Soul album with Just Like Medicine. He went into the studio ready to find his own Soul, recalling that ‘I wanted to make a real Soul album, but not a throwback Stax or Motown album or anything like that, even though Dan Penn was producing and there are great players from that world and Muscle Shoals on these tracks’. Friends help Just Like Medicine go down sweeter as Steve Cropper (“The Heart That Makes Me Whole”) The McCrary Sisters and Muscle Shoals Horns back the songs. Vince Gill joins in on the last tune written by A.J.’s dad, Jim Croce, as the pair offer “Name of the Game”. A.J. Croce finds himself on “The Other Side of Love” walking on a confident rhythm and picks up on fellow piano man Allen Toussaint’s style for the New Orleans-flavored “Full Up” as Just Like Medicine winds down for a slow dance with “Move On”.
Listen and buy the music of A.J. Croce from AMAZON or iTunes

---